Show HN: New way to test APIs with OpenAPI and Postman
80 points by gertjandewilde 3 years ago | 17 comments- piokoch 3 years agoMy problem with Postman is that is very expensive for what it provides. It is $12 per user per month. Microsoft 365 Personal that comes with 1T of storage and all the standard office applications costs $7, business plan starts from $5 to $12 (If only MS Teams was a little better product...).
IntelliJ costs $150 per year and it gives way more value than some tool that can just run tests and allow to share them between people.
Postman has some convenience to run quickly REST call, right, but for anything more serious it is more productive to use Robotframework or after a bit of writing glue code in Java JUnit + Restassured. Everything is in the code, easily versioned.
I don't know how to achieve in Postman tests versioning (different version of a test for a product version or different tests for new API version), probably this can be somehow simulated with environments, etc. but for me this is hacky and hard to maintain. I guess people just copy-paste a collection for new version.
- pan69 3 years agoI've started using Restclient, a VS Code plugin [1]. It allows me to easily add test scripts/requests to my normal GitHub workflow and share them with team mates.
- tomlagier 3 years agoVery cool! We use Postman collections extensively to internally document our APIs and make handoff between frontend and backend easier. We're waffling a bit on backend schema (currently using Yup & Typescript to export request/response types, but no formal definition), but seeing this makes me think it might be worth investing in a migration to OpenAPI, just to ease documentation.
- patricklovesoj 3 years agoWhat are the most biggest challenges with frontend/backend hand-off? I'm exploring this area to build products, so curious to hear what you and your team experience.
- patricklovesoj 3 years ago
- palijer 3 years agoThis seems really cool, but I'm curious about the ethics of creating a tool that seems to replace Postman's paid offerings while leveraging all the free features of Postman.
I'm new to software development though, and I don't have an exact understanding of how open and sharing things are, and while I do understand we are all standing on the shoulders if giants, I wonder how far that goes.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding though, but this seems to be solving a lot of the collaboration issues that exist on the free tier, that they sell for Enterprise postman.
But once again, I'm new to the culture.
- gertjandewilde 3 years agoHi! Interesting point. At Apideck we're a happy (paying) Postman customer. We're not aware of any collaboration limits on the free tier. We created Portman with the intention to scratch our own itch by using OpenAPI as the canonical format to drive our API lifecycle and test automation.
- BerislavLopac 3 years agoOut of curiosity: are you also using is as a spec format? I.e. define the OpenAPI first, and then implement it (either manually or automatically) - as opposed as constructing it out of an exiting implementation.
- BerislavLopac 3 years ago
- gertjandewilde 3 years ago
- gravypod 3 years agoI've been very interested in using containers to have reproducable test environments in the past. I've built something for this: https://bunt.build
I am interested in seeing the configuration leveraging happening in your project though. Very cool.
- crucialfelix 3 years agoWe have fully generated open API for our backend and public API. I've used cypress to test API endpoints but this requires manual setup and lots of work to collect examples.
I look forward to checking this out. We had a breakage in our public API this week because we didn't have full test coverage.
- exdsq 3 years agoYou can get some free coverage through automated fuzzing tools that use OpenAPI to generate tests
- gertjandewilde 3 years agoThanks for sharing. RAFT looks great
- gertjandewilde 3 years ago
- exdsq 3 years ago
- gertjandewilde 3 years agoRead the full blog post at https://blog.apideck.com/announcing-portman
- slava_kiose 3 years agoA great solution. Personally, I really liked this solution. It seems to me that this is the best thing that I have met of this kind.
- jzig 3 years agoI'm confused because Postman already generates a collection from an OpenAPI document. Does this do it differently somehow?
- gertjandewilde 3 years agoGood question! To transform the OpenAPI spec to a Postman collection, we're using the handy openapi-to-postman package from Postman.
The test automation is where the real magic happens.
- gertjandewilde 3 years ago
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- nytgop77 3 years agocurl
- gertjandewilde 3 years ago:)
- gertjandewilde 3 years ago